Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!mit-eddie!bbn!bbn.com!rsalz
From: rsalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: Protocol Design issue
Message-ID: <2210@papaya.bbn.com>
Date: 13 Dec 89 17:36:23 GMT
References: <10439@ucsd.Edu>
Organization: BBN Systems and Technologies Corporation
Lines: 14

In <10439@ucsd.Edu> brian@ucsd.Edu (Brian Kantor) asks about shipping
binary data over a TCP stream in-band, by just using byte-counts.

I wrote an rdist-like replacement for our heterogeneous environment some
months ago, and that's exactly what I do.  A header line with a bytecount,
the bytes, and a trailer line to help catch errors.  We ship around a
couple of megabytes a week around to a variety of hosts (VMS, Ultrix,
Sun[234], ATT3b2, ATT6386, Sun3Mach, BBN Butterfly, Masscomp, Xenix) and
don't have any problems.  XDR is too big and bulky to port all over
when all you want is an opaque eight-bit binary stream.
	/r$
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